Artigo Hans Haacke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke
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Landmark Exhibitions Issue

Lessons Learned
Hans Haacke
As an introduction, let me speak about how I lost my innocence as a starry-eyed art student in Kassel in 1959.
The landscape architect Hermann Mattern had provided a setting for this event four years earlier by planting a
new lawn and fields of roses, bushes to hide behind, and furnishing other amenities in the Karlsaue of Kassel.
For the 1955 Bundesgartenschau he had been commissioned to transform this war-ravaged park, and the ruin
of the Orangerie palace dominating it, into a new place of pleasure. It was the third time this publicly financed
and hugely popular horticultural exhibition was held, each time in a different German city.
Mattern, in fact, had only prepared the grounds for my loss of naivet. The real culprit was a certain
Arnold Bode, a close friend and colleague of Matterns on the faculty of the academy in Kassel, where I was
a student during the second half of the 1950s. With cunning and determination the two developed a scheme
for adding an ambitious art component to the Bundesgartenschau. And they called it documenta.
As a professionally acclaimed landscape architect, Hermann Mattern had survived the Nazi regime
relatively unscathed. Bode, on the other hand, had been fired from his job at an art teachers training college
in Berlin soon after Hitlers rise to power in 1933; and, according to the new terminology, being a
degenerate artist, he could not exhibit his paintings any more. In 1947, the two conspirators and like-minded
friends resuscitated the Kassel art academy and made it an institution in the tradition of the Bauhaus. Studios,
workshops, and an improvised lecture hall of what became my alma mater, were established in an old
barracks building that had miraculously survived the war. That is where Bode and Mattern hatched the
documenta plot in the early 1950s.
Fig.1
Kassel in Ruins 1949
Photograph reproduced in Kunstforum International, ed. Walter Grasskamp, vol.49, 1982, Cologne
Subtitle of issue (transl.): Documenta Myth A Picture Book for Art History
Kassel was a major centre of Hitlers military industrial complex and served as an administrative hub for
the Nazis attempt to implement and export its brand of social engineering. In 1943, the city was subjected to
devastating bombardments (fig.1). Its centre, like the heart of many German cities, was totally destroyed.
Bode recognised the potential of one of the ruins, the Fridericianum, for accommodating the exhibition he
was dreaming of. The Fridericianum had opened in 1779 as a public museum, the first museum built as such
on the continent. Landgrave Frederick II of Hessen-Kassel had paid for it to house his art holdings, various
other collections of his and a library. It offered him a naming opportunity: he called it Fridericianum. The
wherewithal for the collection and the place for its display came from the sale of some 30,000 of his subjects
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to King George III of England, who deployed these Hessian soldiers in the American War of Independence.
As we know, without ultimate success.
Between the end of the Second World War and the reunification of Germany thirty-five years later,
Kassel languished as an isolated backwater, far from major West German centres, about thirty kilometres
away from the Iron Curtain. It was because of this precariousness that the Federal Government of West
Germany and the state of Hesse provided considerable funds to the city, including finance for the 1955
Bundesgartenschau and as its extension a major international art exhibition. The rationale for these
investments was similar to those behind the inclusion of a cultural component in Worlds Fairs, the Olympic
Games, the soccer World Cup and comparable events attracting visitors from around the world: urban
development on a massive scale and building an up-to-date infrastructure. This combination of hard- and
software, invariably, is meant to boost a citys or a countrys image, with the expectation of reaping positive
economic and political rewards. Be that Kassel, London or Beijing, the formula has proven its worth.
Pulling off the documenta scheme required shrewdness, political savvy, and a sense for the practical.
Bode was endowed with all of these. At least as important, however, were his infectious enthusiasm and his
almost naive and total commitment to a notion of art that had nothing to do with economic and political
expediency. Aside from drawing a salary as a painting professor, he had earned extra money and acquired
skills as the designer of trade fair interiors. This experience, and the connections made along the way, served
him well in transforming the ruin of the Fridericianum into the site for what later was referred to as the
museum of 100 days.
Of major historical significance for Germany and perhaps beyond its borders was the programme
Bode and his collaborators developed for this improvised stage in downtown Kassel: nothing less than
introducing or re-introducing Germans to the art which had been produced and exhibited in their own country
before the Nazis banned it as degenerate, and acquainting them with developments in Europe, from which
most had been cut off for almost two decades. In retrospect, it is difficult to fully appreciate the boldness and
the need for such an endeavour nor the consequences it has had.
It was the first documenta of 1955 and word that Fritz Winter, one of the best-known abstract painters in
Germany at the time, had just been appointed to join the faculty, that made me apply for admission to the
Kassel academy. I was accepted. Together with my fellow students, I was hired in 1959 to assist with the
second documenta. We served as guards; and we moved works from one location to another until their
position looked right to Bode and his team. And, even though we had no training other than what we had
picked up during our studies, we led tours of even less informed visitors.
Fig.2
Hans Haacke
Photographic Notes, documenta 2, Arnold Bode 1959
Hans Haacke/VG Bild-Kunst
As sometimes bewildered or awed onlookers, we got a sense that this exhibition was not just an art event
but had national and even international political implications (fig.2). As was to be expected, local dignitaries
like the mayor of Kassel and the governor of the state of Hesse attended the opening. However, the president
of the Republic came, too, as did cabinet members of the Federal government and ambassadors from many
countries. As I learned later, the CIA had sponsored my first encounter with abstract expressionist paintings at
documenta 2. Ironically, while having to fend off McCarthyite accusations against these works, it was the
Museum of Modern Arts International Council that sent them on a European tour to serve as weapons in the
Cold War. In the fight over the hearts and minds of intellectuals on the continent, Kassel, close to the Iron
Curtain, was to serve as a beacon of the free world and contain the inroads so-called socialist realism had
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made in some European art circles (fig.3).
Fig.3
Hans Haacke
Photographic Notes, documenta 2, Pollock Room 1959
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2009
As students of the academy in Kassel, we were aware of this Soviet art doctrine and its brutal
enforcement not far from us to the east. We also understood that documenta played a role in another
ideological struggle, this one home-grown: Hans Sedlmayrs 1948 denunciation of much of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century art and, in particular, of abstract art as a symptom of a loss of the centre.1 Sedlmayr, an
Austrian Nazi collaborator, had succeeded not only in surviving the demise of Hitlers Reich of a Thousand
Years but six years later in landing a senior position and a pulpit on the art history faculty of the University of
Munich. Ingeniously, he had shifted his fascist ideological allegiances to the conservative wing of the Catholic
Church. In art matters, this faction is most conspicuously represented today by Cardinal Meisner of Cologne
(in 2007, during the debate over Gerhard Richters stained-glass windows in the Cologne Cathedral, the
Cardinal warned his flock not to fall for degenerate art). Sedlmayr met a hugely receptive audience and in
1955, the year of the first documenta, his polemic against modern art was re-published as a paperback by
Ullstein, one of Germanys biggest publishing houses.
One year before the first documenta in 1955, Painting in the 20th Century by the art historian Werner
Haftmann was published in Munich.2 It was the first substantial overview of modern art after the war in
Germany. In effect, it was a riposte to the philistine thesis of Hans Sedlmayr. Bode asked Haftmann to join his
team and he became what commentators called the chief ideologue of documenta. His impact in spreading
the word on the art of the first half of the twentieth-century and his personal bias of favouring the cole de
Paris and abstract painting cannot be overestimated. His selections for documenta, however, totally omitted
dada, much of French surrealism, the works of Russian constructivists as well as paintings of Neue
Sachlichkeit. Given the mindset of even the most open-minded art historians of the period it is not surprising
that neither non-Western art nor photography was considered worthy of inclusion. The name of John
Heartfield does not appear in the index of Haftmanns book or in documenta. The phobia about Sovietinspired art, coupled with the devastatingly costly triumph over the kitsch promoted by the Nazis, probably
led to the exclusion of works that articulated political attitudes. Haftmanns bible served as the only tool with
which my peers and I tried to understand what we were guarding at the Fridericianum.
Fig.4
Hans Haacke
Photographic Notes, documenta 2, Mondrian, Klee 1959
DACS 2009
In effect, we also acted as stage-hands. A new term had entered the vocabulary associated with art
presentations: Inszenierung or mise-en-scne, a term derived from the world of the theatre. Bode was the
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most accomplished among those who directed, or staged, exhibitions (fig.4). Mounting a show was not just
putting one picture next to the other on the wall. Individualised spaces were set up for single or sets of works.
The unusual structuring of juxtapositions or placement of works on facing walls, and vistas across adjoining
spaces fostered dialogue between paintings. Fluid transitions between relatively open rooms produced an
ambulatory experience, different from walking through the clearly circumscribed spaces of traditional
museum architecture, or the tedious line-up of booths at trade fairs. Dominating visual axes were either
avoided or created to give leading roles to certain works in Bodes and Haftmanns choreography, as they
did in the Fridericianums two commanding spaces on the second floor. One was dominated by a canvas
approximately 250 cm by 650 cm by the German abstract painter Ernst Wilhelm Nay (fig.5). It was the largest
painting in the show, no doubt boosting Nays reputation. The other space was devoted entirely to Pollock and
presided over by his Number 32 in comparison to Nays painting, a rather small work (fig.6). Fontanas slit
canvases were relegated to the Fridericianums attic. I remember overhearing Werner Schmalenbach, one of
the members of Bodes team, insisting that Robert Rauschenbergs Bed be removed. His wish was granted.
Rudolf Zwirner, who served as secretary of documenta 2 kept the Bed in his office for the duration of the
exhibition. Years later, Schmalenbach acquired Number 32 for the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in
Dsseldorf, a new state museum he was heading by then, and Rudolf Zwirner became a powerhouse among
German art dealers and co-founder of the Cologne Art Fair in 1967.
Fig.5
Hans Haacke
Photographic Notes, documenta 2, Nay, Guided Tour 1959
Fig.6
Hans Haacke
Photographic Notes, documenta 2, Pollock, Child with Toy 1959
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation ARS, NY and DACS, London 2009
Photograph Hans Haacke/VG Bild-Kunst
As I witnessed this particular moment of stage management, I overheard many conversations among art
dealers, collectors, members of the press, as well as with the organisers of the exhibition or behind their
backs. Eventually, it began to dawn on me that documenta and, in fact, all exhibitions, by design or default,
promote the ranking of artists and art movements as much as the prices for which their works are traded. Not
only the selection and, for that matter, the omission of certain works from prestigious exhibitions has
consequences: how they are presented, the attention they receive in the press, the business acumen of dealers
and art advisers, but also the critical and art historical discourse surrounding them, can determine the
reception of these works and their market. Ignoring this inevitable aspect of exhibitions would yield a
flawed comprehension of the dynamics of the art world; yet, to focus exclusively on the commodity status of
art works or an artists celebrity rating among collectors, be that critically or in awe, would lead to an equally
deficient understanding. After the loss of my innocence at documenta, I promised myself never to be
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dependent on the sale of my works to pay the rent.

Ten years after my graduation and five years after my move to New York, Kynaston McShine invited me
to participate in the Information show he was curating in 1970 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It
was the first major exhibition of so-called conceptual art in the United States, after several European
institutions had already introduced many of the artists to their audiences, among them Harald Szeemann in
When Attitudes Become Form at the Berne Kunsthalle and the ICA in London (1969).
Two and a half months before the opening of Information, the USA invaded Cambodia and on 4 May,
during a demonstration of students against the Vietnam War the Ohio National Guard killed four students at
Kent State University. Practically all men of draft age were opposed to the war. Many went to Canada to
evade the draft or tried to get a draft deferment by going to college (I had a number of such students at The
Cooper Union in New York).
Several artists in the Information show were close to the Art Workers Coalition and Art Strike, two groups
responding to the political events of the moment. They viewed the members of the boards of trustees of New
York museums, in particular those of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, as
representatives of the establishment, responsible for the Vietnam War and the maintenance of racial, gender
and economic inequality in the USA. Heated confrontations occurred on the premises of MoMA and the Met.
There were also rumblings by the staff of the Museum of Modern Art to form a labour union. It culminated in
a strike against the museums administration the following year.
Fig.7
Hans Haacke
MoMA-Poll 1970
This was the context in which my MOMA Poll solicited the opinion of the visitors of the Information
show on a topical issue (fig.7). The polling question referred to Nelson Rockefellers campaign for re-election
as Governor of New York State. For many years, Henry Kissinger, who advised President Nixon on the US
bombing of Cambodia and conduct of the so-called Cambodia Incursion had been Nelson Rockefellers
trusted foreign policy consultant. Nelson Rockefeller had himself been president and chairman of the MoMA
Board. His brother David was chairman at the time of the Information show and their sister-in-law was on the
board as well.
I had not revealed the content of my question until the night before the opening. David Rockefeller was
not amused. Word has it that an emissary of his arrived at the Museum the next day to demand the removal of
the poll. However, John Hightower, who had just been appointed director of the Museum, did not follow
orders. He lasted in his job less than two years.
In his Memoirs David Rockefeller offers his reasoning behind John Hightowers short tenure: He
believed museums had an obligation to help society resolve its problems. Since Vietnam was one of the
principal societal problems of the day, John thought MoMA should participate in the national debate He
allowed the bookshop to sell a poster of the infamous My Lai massacre [Three members of the Art
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Workers Coalition had produced the poster.] This was followed by the infamous information exhibition in
the summer of 1970 museum-goers were asked to vote on the question: Would the fact that Governor
Rockefeller had not denounced President Nixons Indochina policy be a reason for you not to vote for him in
November John was entitled to voice his opinions, but he had no right to turn the museum into a forum
for antiwar activism and sexual liberation Bill Paley [chairman of CBS and president of the MoMA
Board], with my full support, fired Hightower in early 1972.3
Fig.8
Hans Haacke
MoMA-Poll (ballots) 1970
During its twelve-week run, the Information show had 299,057 visitors. 12.4 per cent of them participated
in the poll (fig.8). 68.7 per cent dropped their ballots into the No box, indicating their opposition to Nelson
Rockefeller; and 37.3 per cent voted in his favour. It is not surprising that I became persona non grata at
MoMA.
Fig.9
Hans Haacke
Manet-PROJEKT 74 (Hermann J. Abs, one of ten panels) 1974
A few years later I also ran foul of the forces behind the Cologne Wallraf-Richartz Museum. I intended to
include the biography of Hermann Josef Abs in the museums 150-year anniversary show (fig.9). As the
chairman of Deutsche Bank he was a colleague of David Rockefeller. That was too much for the museums
director in Cologne. Perhaps learning from what had happened to John Hightower, he censored the work. The
Cologne museum is a municipal institution. MoMA, by contrast, is private. However, with its tax-exempt
status and the tax-deductibility of donations by its patrons, the Museum of Modern Art is also supported by
taxpayers.
Today, David Rockefeller is still a force to reckon with at The Museum of Modern Art. In 2005 he
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pledged a donation of $100 million. Gratefully, the museum threw him a garden party. Two years earlier,
Rudolph Giuliani had been honoured at such an event for his contribution to the arts in New York after the
mayor had tried to close down the Brooklyn Museum over its exhibition of works by Chris Ofili (fig.10).
There is a tradition.
Fig.10
Hans Haacke
Sanitation (detail; quotes by Rudolph Giuliani) 2000
Fig.11
Hans Haacke
Guggenheim Museum Visitors Profile (unrealised questionnaire) 1971
My interest in getting a sense of the public of art exhibitions began in 1969 with an inquiry into where the
visitors of the Howard Wise Gallery on New Yorks 57th Street were born and where they lived. In 1971,
using a multiple-choice questionnaire, I planned to conduct an expanded poll of the visitors of a show that I
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was scheduled to have at the Guggenheim Museum (fig.11). As is well known, this exhibition was cancelled
six weeks before it was to open. One of the three works the Museum director Thomas Messer objected to was
this poll. It comprised ten demographic questions and ten questions concerning topical, political, and cultural
issues. Messer argued the Museum is non-political, is apolitical, and not concerned with political and social
issues and therefore a political survey would be out of bounds. He saw it as his duty to prevent that an
alien substance enters the Museum organism. I do not know whether the Guggenheim Museum in 1971
conducted audience surveys. Since then, however, the marketing department of every major museum in the
world tries to learn as much as possible about its target audience.
Fig.12
Hans Haacke
Documenta Besucher Profil (documenta visitors completing questionnaires) 1972
The questionnaire of the aborted Guggenheim poll served a few months later as a poll at the Milwaukee
Art Center. And a year later, I took similar surveys of the audiences of the Krefeld Museum Haus Lange,
Harald Szeemanns documenta 5 (fig.12), the Kunstverein in Hanover, Germany, as well as the art crowd
passing through the John Weber Gallery in New York (figs.13, 14). At that time, the John Weber Gallery was
located in a building on West Broadway, together with four other galleries, among them the Castelli Gallery
and the Sonnabend Gallery. The building was then known as the Pentagon of the art world. Of course, this
concentration of galleries in one building in SoHo is nothing next to todays art emporiums in Chelsea.
Fig.13
Hans Haacke
John Weber Gallery Visitors Profile 2 (questionnaire, side 1) 1973
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Fig.14
Hans Haacke
John Weber Gallery Visitors Profile 2 (questionnaire, side 2)
Since the cumulative polling tallies were posted regularly in the exhibition, the visitors, in effect, were
producing a collective self-portrait in a participatory and self-reflective process. I invited them to consider
how much they have in common and how they differ from each other, and to speculate about how,
collectively, their demographic composition and opinions compare with people who do not visit art galleries
and museums exhibiting contemporary art. The data also offered the audience an opportunity to recognise
that art is not produced, viewed and traded in an awe-inspiring world apart but in a continuous social
universe.
In the early 1970s, a relatively large portion of the art audience was rather young; many were college
students. The majority of the older respondents had at least a college education. Many of the young were
living on a relatively low income, but appeared to come from at least a middle class if not well-to-do
background. Since school classes were taken to documenta, a third of the participants of the documenta poll
were high-school students. On both sides of the Atlantic, the visitors were almost uniformly white. At the
height of the Vietnam War and a time of pervasive questioning of political structures, both in Europe and the
USA, it is not surprising that a large number of respondents professed critical attitudes toward their
governments and established institutions. But not only the young among the exhibition visitors, also their
elders could be called liberals (in the American use of the term).
This audience belonged to that segment of society that was or could reasonably be expected in the future
to be close to the decision-makers of the country, if not to occupy influential positions themselves.
Corporations with foresight, in consultation with public relations experts, recognised that this group needed to
be cultivated. As early as 1966, David Rockefeller, in his position as chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank,
had this to say: From an economic standpoint, such involvement in the arts can mean direct and tangible
benefits. It can provide a company with extensive publicity and advertising, a brighter public reputation, and
an improved corporate image. It can build better customer relations, a readier acceptance of company
products, and a superior appraisal of their quality. Promotion of the arts can improve the morale of employees
and help attract qualified personnel. (fig.15)
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Fig.15
Hans Haacke
On Social Grease (quote David Rockefeller; one of six panels) 1975
Photograph: Walter Russell
One of the early attempts to act on this understanding was, in 1968, the sponsorship by Philip Morris of
Harald Szeemanns When attitudes become form (fig.16). Ruder & Finn, a New York public relations firm,
guided the tobacco giant in this venture. In 2008, at the University of Venice, Claudia di Lecce wrote a thesis
with the title Avant-garde Marketing on this collaboration Under the heading Arts & Culture, Ruder &
Finn currently tells the visitor of their website about what they are good at: Our staff has experience in all of
the following areas: institutional and corporate branding, identity and positioning; international and national
media relations and special event management; sponsorship development and promotion; exhibition
organization and circulation; strategic planning; and crisis communication.4 Among their corporate clients (in
the past) they list David Rockefellers Chase Manhattan Bank and Mobil.
Fig.16
Hans Haacke
Helmsboro Country (detail; quote by George Weissman) 1990
Since the 1970s, Mobil and Exxon (now merged) have been conspicuous sponsors of art exhibitions. In
1984 Mobil treated an exhibition of mine at the Tate Gallery to what Ruder & Finn elegantly calls crisis
communication. It demanded that the catalogue of the show be taken out of circulation. Supposedly, I had
violated Mobils copyright in several of my works (fig.17). For almost an entire year the Tate Gallery did, in
fact, pull the catalogue. It was released only after a big New York law firm explained to the Tate that Mobil
had peddled a bogus interpretation of US law. Under the so-called fair-use doctrine, my use of the companys
logo and quotes from its public pronouncements are exempt from copyright protection. Of course, they did
not quite conform to the notion of Art, for the sake of business, as Mobil had proclaimed in an
advertisement on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. For the dense reader of this ad the sponsors offered
this reasoning: Whats in it for us or for your company? Improving and securing the business climate.
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Fig.17
Hans Haacke
Creating Consent 1981
Photograph: Fred Scruton
Six years later, Philip Morris (now sailing under the name of Altria) did not appreciate my interpretation
of innovation and experimentation that the company had claimed when it sponsored Harald Szeemanns
Berne exhibition. John Weber got a letter from Philip Morriss counsel, warning him that the company would
react negatively if his gallery were to go ahead with an exhibition of mine that revealed the tobacco
companys sponsorship of Senator Jesse Helms as one could deduce from the shows announcement Helms
had made himself a name as the most powerful culture warrior of his time. Fortunately, John Weber was not
intimidated. The show went on (fig.18).
Fig.18
Hans Haacke
Helmsboro Country 1990
Photograph: Fred Scruton
My citing these examples risks being understood as petty attempts to get even over minor slights, and
overlooking the dependency of so many museums and art venues on corporate support. Therefore I like to
quote an expert, Philippe de Montebello, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum. In 1985 he
confided to Newsweek: Its an inherent, insidious, hidden form of censorship. He probably meant
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self-censorship. Exhibition projects that are not likely to attract crowds, or could cause damaging
controversies within the sponsors target group, are abandoned before the institution even looks for outside
funding. Curators have internalised these rules of the game and, understandably, do not want to waste their
time. The corporations largesse, of course, is tax-deductible (fig.19).
Fig.19
Hans Haacke
MetroMobiltan Detail (quote from Metropolitan Museum flyer The Business of Art knows the Art of Good Business) 1985
Documenta in its early days attracted a mere 135,000 visitors, and Harald Szeemanns instalment in 1972
increased attendance to approximately 230,000. These are paltry figures. Art audiences have since grown
exponentially as has the size of museum gift shops. Blockbuster exhibitions are de rigueur. Even the former
stepchild, contemporary art, has become glamorous, in part due to a new breed of turbo collectors and multimillion dollar price tags. Accelerating and banking on this development, the fashion industry has moved in.
Major fashion houses have joined the club of sponsors courted by museums, curators, and an increasing
number of artists. The rag trade emulates the example of oil companies, high-end car manufacturers and
banks, whose PR departments had recognised decades ago how an association with culture could improve
their image and sales, and make them immune to critical questioning of their business practices. Already in
Kassel, a hunch that documenta might attract hotel guests to this godforsaken city and fill restaurants and
bars, encouraged the expenditure of tax money. Today, it is generally understood that the tourist and
entertainment industry benefits from big art exhibitions. This year, the mayor of New York appointed the
Metropolitan Museums President Emily Rafferty to chair the board of NYC & Company, the citys marketing
and tourism organisation.
Fig.20
Bust of Riccardo Selvatico, Mayor of Venice, Giardini Pubblici, Biennale Site, Venice
As early as 1895, well before documenta, Riccardo Selvatico, the mayor of Venice (fig.20), invented an
art fair to promote the artists in town and to boost the local tourist industry. The then dominant nations of
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Europe took an interest in his venture. France, Britain, and Germany joined. Each built a national pavilion
and hoisted their flags on a hill in the Giardini Pubblici, a hill, which had been created from the rubble of the
campanile of San Marco after its collapse in 1902. Other nations followed in the lowlands. It became the
mother of all biennials.
Fig.21
Hans Haacke
GERMANIA 1993. Entrance to German Pavilion, Venice Bienniale
Commissioner of the German pavilion for the 1993 instalment of the Venice Biennale was Klaus
Bussmann, at the time the director of the Westflisches Landesmuseum and known as the co-founder of
Skulptur-Projekte Mnster. The pavilion is owned by the German government and administered by its
Foreign Office (fig.21). Government officials urged Bussmann to select an East German and a West German
artist, now that the two parts of Germany were reunited. In his view, this smacked of nationalism. And he
resented the meddling in his selection process. In response, he asked Nam June Paik and me to occupy the
site on the hill. Paik was Korean, and I had been living in New York since 1965 and had not made myself
popular among officials of my native country.
After some soul-searching, I accepted Bussmanns invitation. I decided to represent Germany in both
senses of the term: being the official representative of Germany the flag bearer, so to speak and producing
a representation of the country. Preparing for this task, I researched the pavilions history, and, for hours, sat
alone in its nave which had been assigned to me.
Fig.22
Hans Haacke
GERMANIA (detail) 1993
I learned that the pavilions present appearance was tied to Hitlers rise to power in 1933. As part of an
excursion to Venice for a meeting with his comrade Benito Mussolini, the man who had not succeeded as a
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painter in Vienna, paid a visit to the Biennale and the German pavilion (fig.22). Hitler did not like what he
saw. As a consequence, by 1937 an exhibition titled Degenerate Art opened in Munich, and plans for the
re-styling of the pavilion in Venice were approved. A new national corporate identity was in the making and
so were preparations for the expansion of Germany beyond its borders and the introduction of a deadly
programme of ethnic cleansing.
Fig.23
Entrance to German Pavilion, Venice Bienniale, 1940
(Arno Breker, Readiness 1939)
Biennale Archives, Venice
Hitlers invasion of Poland and, as a consequence, the beginning of the Second World War, was
accompanied by Arno Brekers occupation of the German pavilion in the Giardini Pubblici, in 1939 (fig.23).
For the occasion, Paiks and my predecessor presented to the international art world a body builder drawing
his sword. The title of his statue was Readiness. A lot had happened since. Fifty years later, with the
reunification of Germany, a significant step could be taken to repair at least some of the horrific damage of
the proclaimed readiness. As we all know, the human toll of these years could not be undone.
Fig.24
Hans Haacke
GERMANIA 1993
Photograph: Roman Mensing
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I had not anticipated that the rubble of the marble plates (fig.24), with which Hitlers architect had
replaced the pavilions original parquet floor, would make some viewers think of Caspar David Friedrichs
18234 Shipwreck of Hope, now at the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The painting has been interpreted as expressing
Friedrichs despair over the central European monarchies successful repression of the Republican
movements and of the democratic agitation that had been inspired by the French Revolution and was
followed by victory in the wars of liberation against Napoleon. The fact that the masts of the ship caught in
the ice look like the trunks of fir trees with stumps of cut off branches encourages me to accept this
interpretation. Friedrich is known for encoding political symbols in his paintings. To him fir trees represented
Germany. I observed how visitors of the field of rubble in the German pavilion picked up unbroken plates
and, with obvious emotion, smashed them to bits. Children used it as an adventure playground.
My works have been presented in a number of documentas and biennials. Some of these spectaculars may
be traded under the heading landmark exhibitions. What qualifies as such, of course, is fungible. The most
recent Biennial including works of mine was the Gwangju Biennial in Korea, which opened in early
September 2008.
Like documenta, the Johannesburg Biennial and the Gwangju Biennale respectively, the first biennials in
Africa and in Asia, and both founded in 1995 have political origins. In Johannesburg, it marked the cultural
opening after apartheid. Less known is the story behind the Gwangju Biennale. Gwangju, about two hours
south of Seoul, was distant or in outright opposition to the eighteen-year reign of the South Korean dictator
Park Chung-hee and his equally dictatorial successor. In May 1980, an uprising, spearheaded by local students
and professors, was brutally suppressed by the military. Many hundreds of demonstrators were massacred
(fig.25). In 1995, a few years after a democratically elected president was inaugurated in Seoul, the Gwangju
Biennale was founded as part of the retrospective celebration of the democratic uprising and a
commemoration of its martyrs.
Fig.25
Hans Haacke
National Cemetery at outskirts of Gwangju, where the victims of 18 May 1980 uprising against the South Korean dictatorship are buried.
In his foreword to the Biennale catalogue, the citys mayor, who is also the President of the Gwangju
Biennale Foundation, said: the Gwangju Biennale belongs to civil society on the one hand, and on the other,
it is a public and communal product of the co-operation among cultural agents, artists, economists and the city
of Gwangju These efforts will no doubt cohere positioning Gwangju as a strategic signpost on the road to
becoming the cultural hub-city of the global village and the cultural capital of Asia.5 Both the city of 1.3
million and the Seoul government appear ready to provide the funds for such an enterprise. Aside from the
aspect of political restitution, they recognise the potentially profitable conversion of the symbolic capital of
Gwangju into economic capital, with which they hope to secure the citys future as the cultural capital of
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Asia (fig.26). Conversions of the symbolic capital of art works into economic capital have always been the
raison dtre of the art market, too.
Fig.26
Hans Haacke
Promotion of Gwangju as Culture Hub City of Asia (municipal building, Gwangju) 2008
Okwui Enwezor, who had curated the 2nd Johannesburg Biennial in 1997 and documenta in 2002, was
appointed artistic director of this years Gwangju Biennale. The encounter with works in galleries i.e. in art
trading posts has always had an effect on selections for ostensibly non-commercial presentations. Okwui
Enwezor (fig.27) openly put his Biennale under the heading Annual Report. He invites the reader of the
bilingual catalogue to follow A Year in Exhibitions, presenting on sixty pages the press releases of the galleries
and not-for-profit venues visited. He and his co-curators Hyunjin Kim of Korea and Ranjit Hoskote from
India, and the four authors of so-called Position Papers and Insertions, based in Korea, the Philippines,
Morocco, and New Orleans, selected works from around the world. None of the artists and groups chosen can
be considered big players in the contemporary art market. A great number are not from Western Europe or
the USA. Probably for that reason, the majority was unknown to me. In many instances, I had difficulty in
getting a sense of the meaning of their works, because I knew little or nothing about the context in which and
for which they had been made. It was challenging, and I learned a lot.
Fig.27
Hans Haacke
Okwui Enwezor, Commissioner of Gwangju Biennial 2008
The Gwangju Biennial attracted 400,000 visitors this year most of them from the region, and among
those a great number were school classes. Last years documenta had 750,000 visitors. Also in Kassel a great
many were high-school students under the guidance of a teacher. It would be worth exploring what either
public made of the works it was exposed to. I am certain, however, that the exposure to these exhibitions will
affect their sense of themselves and of the world they live in. Such experiences have the potential of
contributing to the social consensus of a period and a country.
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Fig.28
Hans Haacke
Photographic Notes, documenta 2, Cleaning Women (Hans Haacke) 1959
Fig.29
Hans Haacke
Wide White Flow 1967 (installation at Gwangju Biennial 2008)
In January 2008, Okwui Enwezor saw an exhibition of mine at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York. He
decided to make the entire show part of his Annual Report. To be seen in Gwangju were five works from the
show: photographs that I had taken at documenta in 1959 (fig.28), Wide White Flow, an installation with
moving parts from the 1960s (fig.29), one of the three works that cost me the solo show at the Guggenheim
Museum (fig.30), and two works offering a sense of my feelings about current US politics, Trickle Up (figs.31,
32) and Mission Accomplished (fig.33) The most recent is a torn image of the stars in heaven and the
American Flag on earth (fig.34).
Fig.30
Hans Haacke
Sol Goldman and Alex DiLorenzo Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, 1971 (detail)
Fig.31
Hans Haacke
Trickle Up 1992 (as shown at Gwangju Biennial 2008)
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Fig.32
Hans Haacke
Trickle Up 1992 (detail)
Fig.33
Hans Haacke
Mission Accomplished 2005 (detail, on wall, as exhibited at Gwangju Biennial 2008)
Fig.34
Hans Haacke
Mission Accomplished 2005 (detail, on floor, as exhibited at Gwangju Biennial 2008)
Notes
1 Hans Sedlmayr, Art In Crisis: The Lost Center, New Brunswick 2006 (German version originally published
in 1948, English translation 1957).
2. Werner Haftmann, Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert, Munich 1954.
3. David Rockefeller, Memoirs New York 2002, pp.4523.
4. http://www.ruderfinn.com/corporate-public-trust/arts-culture.html
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5. Foreword, Annual Report: A Year in Exhibitions, exhibition catalogue, 7th Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju
Biennale Foundation and BOM [Books on the Move]), 2008.
Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was presented at the conference Landmark Exhibitions: Contemporary Art Shows
Since 1968, a collaboration between Tate Modern and Jan van Eyck Academie with the Royal College of Art
and The London Consortium, in October 2008. Other papers relating to the conference can be found in issue
12 of Tate Papers.
Hans Haacke is a German-American artist who lives and works in New York.
Tate Papers Autumn 2009 Hans Haacke
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Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

TATES ONLINE RESEARCH JOURNAL

Landmark Exhibitions Issue

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

made in some European art circles (fig.3).

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

dependent on the sale of my works to pay the rent.

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

Hans Haacke/VG Bild-Kunst

Tate Papers Issue 12 2009: Hans Haccke

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